IgnitePlay: Encouraging and sustaining healthy living through social games
Found in:
International Games Innovation Conference
By Magy Seif El-Nasr,Lisa Andres,Terry Lavender,Natalie Funk,Nasim Jahangiri,Mengting Sun
Issue Date:November 2011
pp. 23-25
Many successful social and casual games use techniques in their design that help sustain players' interest over time. The success of these games amongst players who consider themselves 'non-gamers' has resulted in the development of applications that attem...

Analysis of telemetry data from a real-time strategy game: A case study
Found in:
Computers in Entertainment (CIE)
By André R. Gagné, Chris D. Shaw, Magy Seif El-Nasr
Issue Date:October 2012
pp. 1-25
This article describes the analysis of a simple, free-to-play real-time strategy (RTS) game called Pixel Legions. In developing this analysis, we worked with the developer to instrument, collect, and analyze telemetry data. The game design questions examin...

Design patterns of focused attention
Found in:
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Design Patterns in Games (DPG '12)
By David Milam, Lyn Bartram, Magy Seif El-Nasr
Issue Date:May 2012
pp. 1-8
This paper explores game design patterns specific to the visual presentation of game elements. Informed by the similarity theory of visual perception coupled with designers' tacit knowledge, we establish an empirical basis to investigate visual balance, sp...

Programming, PWNed: using digital game development to enhance learners' competency and self-efficacy in a high school computing science course
Found in:
Proceedings of the 43rd ACM technical symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE '12)
By David Milam, Magy Seif El-Nasr, Darren Yung, Katie Seaborn
Issue Date:February 2012
pp. 93-98
Games are an important part of popular culture and have successfully engaged audiences from different age groups [8]. This has caused many educators to start thinking of different ways to infuse game-based techniques (playing or construction) to enhance ed...

User studies: a strategy towards a successful industry-academic relationship
Found in:
Proceedings of the International Academic Conference on the Future of Game Design and Technology (Futureplay '10)
By Anders Drachen, Bardia Aghabeigi, Beth Aileen Lameman, Dinara Moura, Magy Seif El-Nasr, Wendy Foster
Issue Date:May 2010
pp. 134-142
Game industry-academic relationships are traditionally related to technology development and education, but more research-oriented partnerships outside of direct technology development and education are forming. With these types of partnerships come stumbl...

Understanding and evaluating cooperative games
Found in:
Proceedings of the 28th international conference on Human factors in computing systems (CHI '10)
By Bardia Aghabeigi, Beth Lameman, David Milam, Hamid Maygoli, Magy Seif El-Nasr, Mona Erfani, Sang Mah
Issue Date:April 2010
pp. 253-262
Cooperative design has been an integral part of many games. With the success of games like Left4Dead, many game designers and producers are currently exploring the addition of cooperative patterns within their games. Unfortunately, very little research inv...

Projecting tension in virtual environments through lighting
Found in:
Proceedings of the 2006 ACM SIGCHI international conference on Advances in computer entertainment technology (ACE '06)
By Magy Seif El-Nasr
Issue Date:June 2006
pp. 63-es
Interactive synthetic environments are currently used in a wide variety of applications, including video games, exposure therapy, education, and training. Their success in such domains relies on their immersive and engagement qualities. Filmmakers and thea...

Visual attention in 3D video games
Found in:
Proceedings of the 2006 ACM SIGCHI international conference on Advances in computer entertainment technology (ACE '06)
By Magy Seif El-Nasr, Su Yan
Issue Date:June 2006
pp. 22-es
Understanding players' visual attention patterns within an interactive 3D game environment is an important research area that can improve game level design and graphics. Several graphics techniques use a perception based rendering method to enhance graphic...

Fun & games: on the process of game design
Found in:
Proceedings of the 6th ACM conference on Designing Interactive systems (DIS '06)
By Joshua B. Gross, Magy Seif El-Nasr
Issue Date:June 2006
pp. 369-370
The game design process is largely driven by practice. While some work has been done in academia targeting the definition of a theoretical foundation for the process of game design, these two communities rarely came together to discuss their perspective th...

Learning through game modding
Found in:
Computers in Entertainment (CIE)
By Brian K. Smith, Magy Seif El-Nasr
Issue Date:January 2006
pp. 7-es
There has been a recent increase in the number of game environments or engines that allow users to customize their gaming experiences by building and expanding game behavior. This article describes the use of modifying, or modding, existing games as a mean...

A user-centric adaptive story architecture: borrowing from acting theories
Found in:
Proceedings of the 2004 ACM SIGCHI International Conference on Advances in computer entertainment technology (ACE '04)
By Magy Seif El-Nasr
Issue Date:June 2005
pp. 109-116
Interactive virtual environments are becoming increasingly popular for their utility in education, virtual training, and entertainment. These applications often rely on a scenario that is revealed to the user as he/she interacts with synthetic objects and ...

Automating Lighting Design for Interactive Entertainment
Found in:
Computers in Entertainment (CIE)
By Ian Horswill, Magy Seif El-Nasr
Issue Date:April 2004
pp. 15-15
Recent advances in computer graphics, particularly in real-time rendering, have resulted in major improvements in 3D graphics and rendering techniques in interactive entertainment. In this article we focus on the scene-lighting process, which we define as ...

PETEEI: a PET with evolving emotional intelligence
Found in:
Proceedings of the third annual conference on Autonomous Agents (AGENTS '99)
By John Yen, Magy Seif El-Nasr, Thomas R. Ioerger
Issue Date:April 1999
pp. 9-15
When creating virtual reality environments a large amount of the interaction needs to be programmed. The problem with this is that non-computer expert users lack the programming skills necessary to create useful applications. Specifying interactions remain...

Visualizing and understanding players' behavior in video games: discovering patterns and supporting aggregation and comparison
Found in:
Proceedings of the 2011 ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Video Games (Sandbox '11)
By Christopher D. Shaw, Dinara Moura, Magy Seif el-Nasr
Issue Date:August 2011
pp. 11-15
As video games become more popular, there is an urge for procedures that can support the analysis and understanding of players' behaviors within game environments. Such data would inform game and level designers of game design issues that should be fixed o...